You're mostly right in principle (flipping a coin to decide the president: fine), but there is now an exception regarding disenfranchisement of voters. The Fifteenth Amendment is quite clear that you can't let a subset of your citizens vote based on race/color, and along with the Fourteenth's "equal protection clause" has been interpreted to mean that you can't give a subset of your state's citizens more effective votes based on geography.
Ironic, that last bit, since the primary effect of the electoral college today is to give a subset of our nation's citizens much more effective votes based on whether or not they're in a swing state...
If there is some important goal that this accomplishes, I would love to hear it.
It's a historical relic, back from when "The United States" was a phrase that could be understood by parsing the meaning of each individual word, rather than just a catchy title. People were afraid that block voting in large states would be unfair to citizens of small states.
The mechanics of communicating votes had nothing to do with it (it's not hard to send "N of our voters vote for X" instead of "N of our electors vote for X"); the mechanics of communicating culture is what has changed. There was once a time when it would have seemed ridiculous that rural New York voters would feel more closely tied to rural South Carolina voters than to urban New York voters, but here we are.
The current value of the electoral college is nil, except that it allows those of us in non-swing states to cast third party votes without worrying about throwing our votes away. But it might have some future value: Do you think that plurality voting is a great idea? I hope not. (What was I just saying about throwing our votes away?) But it's an idea that can probably be more easily fixed from the bottom up, so long as states are free to change their voting system without getting the approval of the entire country first.
Traceroute tells me that it's 26 hops from me to the first computer in India I tried, and that looks like it's getting dangerously close to their default 30 hop max. Now, I don't know enough about network protocols to be sure of the best way to prune that route back if it grows to 27 hops, but I bet this new idea of singling out the guy running router number 26 and arresting him should work just fine. Clearly India's regulators know almost as much as I do about the Internets!
Read The Door Into Summer: the guy practically designed AutoCAD in 1956, but with the computer interfacing directly with a plotter. The missing piece was the idea of using video rather than the paper itself to visualize intermediate results.
And I assure you, it also wasn't the designers' idea to have players start out at level 2, then advance through levels 3, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 9, 13, and 1, in that order.
At the end of the day, somebody has to produce the goods that will be consumed each year.
This is not true. My consumption this year was split roughly evenly between goods that were produced this year, goods that were produced years ago, and goods that were produced decades ago. Even of the goods I consumed that were produced this year, their prices were relatively low thanks to a long term investment (in the actual, physical sense, which is a closer reflection of paper notes than you might imagine) of automation, cultivation, and other such productivity boosts.
And that's not a static split. When people start working and saving more, they produce a surplus. When part of this surplus isn't of goods that are quickly perishable, then it represents an actual physical investment for the future. When part of this surplus must be immediately consumed, oversupply lowers the prices of those items, which provides economic incentives to shift production into more durable goods instead. The reverse process happens when a demographic boom wants to spend their investments: the same effect that devalues their investments somewhat also raises prices on the consumables they want to buy with them which encourages a temporary shift of production into those items. Anticipating such a boom also provides financial incentives to build more of the capital that will become necessary to fulfill them when they happen.
These are just basic implications of supply and demand, but already they're complicated enough not to be immediately obvious - which is actually why that system can work better than central planning. Predicting and planning for the future effects of major economic changes is hard enough even when everybody gets to try, we've all got unbiased pricing information to help, and being good at it can make you rich. It's even more difficult when only a few people are in charge, there's no reward for success, and the primary qualification to play is a popular media campaign. Social Security does have some of the same effect I described above, though, or at least it would if the taxation (excuse me, "withholding") and payments were controlled more by economic tradeoffs and less by political concerns.
No, the reason for Social Security isn't that there aren't economic advantages to letting people plan for their own retirement. We need Social Security because we know some people will fail to adequately prepare for retirement. Because "let old people starve" isn't a very good option, we want to ensure that we can meet at least their basic needs publicly, and at that point it makes some sense to force everyone into the system to try to reduce free rider problems.
You've identified that our root problem is that too many people are ignorant about what the government we empowered is doing wrong.
You think that anyone who wants to tell others (or "whine", if you want to spin it that way) about what the government is doing wrong should just "suck it up"....
I don't think you've quite finished thinking the problem through.
You know what's an important part of storytelling?
FINISHING THE FREAKING STORY
Like, when you've gotten through the backstory and the character development, and you get to the first big climax, the cliffhanger where you have the audience wondering which of their heroes will live and which will die?
That is NOT the right time to roll the credits. And if there are a half dozen important subplots that haven't even reached their climax yet? Then it is DEFINITELY NOT the right time to roll the credits.
Oh, who am I kidding. I could turn this rant into a treatise, but I know I'm still going to buy The Longest Journey 3 (or Dreamfall: Chapters, or whatever it gets called), even if it doesn't come out for another five years. And he knows people like me are still going to buy it, even if it's only sold for two hundred dollars with an uncrackable installer EULA which can only be accepted by submitting a video recording of the prospective customer saying "Please, Mr. Tornquist, I humbly beg for permission to play your sequel."
I thought we were trying to preserve jobs for Shuttle contractors while giving them a good excuse to stop doing risky things like launching Shuttles. If our primary goal was to lift stuff into space, we'd have designed our stuff to fit on a heavy Delta or Atlas, so as to be prepared for the worst if the Ares I fails and prepared for the best if the Falcon 9 succeeds.
I think you're missing the purpose of what a graphics processing unit is for.
No, he's going beyond the purpose of what a graphics processing unit was originally for, and looking ahead to what General Purpose GPU computing is going tobe for. There's nothing in the GPU that requires it to operate on polygons; the silicon is there to do parallel stream processing, and streams of geometry/texture/lighting/etc data are just one of the ways to use that.
The greatest thing that's wrong with politics right now is this team sport cheerleader mentality.
You're absolutely right!
Just ask Joel Liberman, who supports the Iraq war and some tax cuts and was attacked by his own party by them running and financing another Democrat to take his seat.
Wait, what?
Joe Lieberman's primary challenge was the opposite of the team cheerleader mentality. Instead of saying "He's a Democrat; we can't challenge his seat!" people were willing to look at the actual issues he supported and decide that they could put a better Democrat in office. In other words, they were able to look past the team colors he was wearing and judge him by how well he was playing. Just because you don't agree with those voters' definition of "well", don't dismiss what a valuable service they're performing by making Democratic politicians more aware that even the 50% of the population that mostly agrees with them aren't going to give them a free pass for having a "D" by their name.
Now all we need is for more Republican voters to do the same; if so many of them hadn't put that "team spirit" ahead of conservative values, the Bush administration and their cronies might have been replaced in time to save their party from imploding.
There are a couple changes that could make this easier. Get rid of plurality voting so that it becomes possible for moderate third party candidates to run without sabotaging their own voters. Get rid of the seniority system that punishes anyone who wants to replace their incumbent in Congress. But I suspect that if we could somehow get past the psychological problems of party politics, we'd find it easy to fix the technical deficiencies.
Another thing he failed to take into account is that people rationalise their "evil" choices to make it sound righteous. So people tell themselves and others its because of DRM or its because of the price or whatnot when in reality its just that they don't want to fork over money for it.
The first thing to ask someone like that is: "What [games/movies/music/etc] have you *not* pirated?" If they can name several titles, then you know there's at least some way for publishers to behave differently which could cause such a person to make another purchase instead of committing more copyright infringement. If they try to insist that every single creator in an entire medium can somehow be dismissed with one rationalization or another, then you can be pretty sure they're either lying to you or lying to themselves.
And who gave you the right to decide how each country and culture should think?
But you have not got the right to tell others that they are wrong simply because it is not in accord with your own personal view or it isn't the view adopted by your own country.
The United States and freedom of speech gives him the right to tell others that they are wrong for any reason at all (even when they're not!). I hope you're not trying to decide how my country and culture should think.
All I'm refuting is the idea that there was no common ancestor to all the life we know of today. It's entirely possible that there were multiple genesis events but that our ancestral cells wiped out all the competition.
I'd still bet against it, though. It seems like the "first mover" advantage would be too great; any potential competition would be eaten before it even got to the stage where genetic codes make sense.
Two independent life forms could make the same right vs. left handed sugar choice with 50% odds. I find 1 in 20^64 magnitude odds more convincing: specifically the genetic code.
All life just coincidentally decided that CAG was going to mean glutamine? And with the exception of a few codes in mitochondria and a few eukaryotes, the hypothetical multiple genesis also gave us random agreement on the meaning of 63 other codons? No. If every cell on Earth agrees on 55 out of 64 codes, and most agree on all 64, it's a very safe bet that their translation machinery was an inheritance from the same ancestor.
If you don't know that VASIMR is an electro-thermal rocket, ie. one that uses an electric power source to excite the plasma, that's okay, but in that case you should probably think twice before insulting anyone (yes, "your idea is stupid" is an unnecessary insult) who tries to correct you. If you think that being corrected when you post something mistaken and insulting is "patronizing", imagine how it looks when you try to correct people who are trying to post something factual and polite.
If NASA had that attitude we'd probably have thousands of blown rocket husks laying about the island of Florida's thousand of craters.
Well, the government's first orbital rockets did tally up eight Vanguard husks from eleven launches. I'm very glad we did have Elon Musk's attitude back then, because "never say die" appears to be a big part of how we got to the Moon in the next decade from such inauspicious beginnings. I hope we still have the same attitude now, because it's going to be necessary if we're going to get through the redesign work necessary to make it affordable to get into space to stay.
The reliability problems will get better, if they can afford to make enough flights and gather enough data to work out the problems. One of the best current launch vehicles used by NASA evolved from ICBMs such as the ones that had given us four Atlas A husks out of eight (very suborbital) launches, through a series of successors with failure ratios like 3/10, 2/6, 32/135, 15/48... check out all the different versions for yourself, and get an idea of why aerospace engineering has entered the lexicon with "rocket science" as a synonym for "something really hard".
Whether he has or hasn't, he may have instead been talking about an electric rocket, such as the one described here and discussed here. I'd say that calling him "stupid" for that was rude, but mostly it was just perplexing.
Slashdot Mirror
You're mostly right in principle (flipping a coin to decide the president: fine), but there is now an exception regarding disenfranchisement of voters. The Fifteenth Amendment is quite clear that you can't let a subset of your citizens vote based on race/color, and along with the Fourteenth's "equal protection clause" has been interpreted to mean that you can't give a subset of your state's citizens more effective votes based on geography.
Ironic, that last bit, since the primary effect of the electoral college today is to give a subset of our nation's citizens much more effective votes based on whether or not they're in a swing state...
If there is some important goal that this accomplishes, I would love to hear it.
It's a historical relic, back from when "The United States" was a phrase that could be understood by parsing the meaning of each individual word, rather than just a catchy title. People were afraid that block voting in large states would be unfair to citizens of small states.
The mechanics of communicating votes had nothing to do with it (it's not hard to send "N of our voters vote for X" instead of "N of our electors vote for X"); the mechanics of communicating culture is what has changed. There was once a time when it would have seemed ridiculous that rural New York voters would feel more closely tied to rural South Carolina voters than to urban New York voters, but here we are.
The current value of the electoral college is nil, except that it allows those of us in non-swing states to cast third party votes without worrying about throwing our votes away. But it might have some future value: Do you think that plurality voting is a great idea? I hope not. (What was I just saying about throwing our votes away?) But it's an idea that can probably be more easily fixed from the bottom up, so long as states are free to change their voting system without getting the approval of the entire country first.
Traceroute tells me that it's 26 hops from me to the first computer in India I tried, and that looks like it's getting dangerously close to their default 30 hop max. Now, I don't know enough about network protocols to be sure of the best way to prune that route back if it grows to 27 hops, but I bet this new idea of singling out the guy running router number 26 and arresting him should work just fine. Clearly India's regulators know almost as much as I do about the Internets!
Step 1: Run Kopete.
Glad I could help. Let me know if you have any more questions.
Read The Door Into Summer: the guy practically designed AutoCAD in 1956, but with the computer interfacing directly with a plotter. The missing piece was the idea of using video rather than the paper itself to visualize intermediate results.
Aimed at whatever Fox executive decided to show Firefly episodes completely out of order.
And I assure you, it also wasn't the designers' idea to have players start out at level 2, then advance through levels 3, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 9, 13, and 1, in that order.
Yeah, but very few of us spend half of our income purchasing antiques on eBay.
When was your house or apartment built? How much of your income is spent on mortgage/property taxes/rent?
At the end of the day, somebody has to produce the goods that will be consumed each year.
This is not true. My consumption this year was split roughly evenly between goods that were produced this year, goods that were produced years ago, and goods that were produced decades ago. Even of the goods I consumed that were produced this year, their prices were relatively low thanks to a long term investment (in the actual, physical sense, which is a closer reflection of paper notes than you might imagine) of automation, cultivation, and other such productivity boosts.
And that's not a static split. When people start working and saving more, they produce a surplus. When part of this surplus isn't of goods that are quickly perishable, then it represents an actual physical investment for the future. When part of this surplus must be immediately consumed, oversupply lowers the prices of those items, which provides economic incentives to shift production into more durable goods instead. The reverse process happens when a demographic boom wants to spend their investments: the same effect that devalues their investments somewhat also raises prices on the consumables they want to buy with them which encourages a temporary shift of production into those items. Anticipating such a boom also provides financial incentives to build more of the capital that will become necessary to fulfill them when they happen.
These are just basic implications of supply and demand, but already they're complicated enough not to be immediately obvious - which is actually why that system can work better than central planning. Predicting and planning for the future effects of major economic changes is hard enough even when everybody gets to try, we've all got unbiased pricing information to help, and being good at it can make you rich. It's even more difficult when only a few people are in charge, there's no reward for success, and the primary qualification to play is a popular media campaign. Social Security does have some of the same effect I described above, though, or at least it would if the taxation (excuse me, "withholding") and payments were controlled more by economic tradeoffs and less by political concerns.
No, the reason for Social Security isn't that there aren't economic advantages to letting people plan for their own retirement. We need Social Security because we know some people will fail to adequately prepare for retirement. Because "let old people starve" isn't a very good option, we want to ensure that we can meet at least their basic needs publicly, and at that point it makes some sense to force everyone into the system to try to reduce free rider problems.
You've identified that our root problem is that too many people are ignorant about what the government we empowered is doing wrong.
You think that anyone who wants to tell others (or "whine", if you want to spin it that way) about what the government is doing wrong should just "suck it up". ...
I don't think you've quite finished thinking the problem through.
You know what's an important part of storytelling?
FINISHING THE FREAKING STORY
Like, when you've gotten through the backstory and the character development, and you get to the first big climax, the cliffhanger where you have the audience wondering which of their heroes will live and which will die?
That is NOT the right time to roll the credits. And if there are a half dozen important subplots that haven't even reached their climax yet? Then it is DEFINITELY NOT the right time to roll the credits.
Oh, who am I kidding. I could turn this rant into a treatise, but I know I'm still going to buy The Longest Journey 3 (or Dreamfall: Chapters, or whatever it gets called), even if it doesn't come out for another five years. And he knows people like me are still going to buy it, even if it's only sold for two hundred dollars with an uncrackable installer EULA which can only be accepted by submitting a video recording of the prospective customer saying "Please, Mr. Tornquist, I humbly beg for permission to play your sequel."
These are the Chinese gymnasts we're talking about. You're thinking of the Eastern European teams.
I thought we were trying to preserve jobs for Shuttle contractors while giving them a good excuse to stop doing risky things like launching Shuttles. If our primary goal was to lift stuff into space, we'd have designed our stuff to fit on a heavy Delta or Atlas, so as to be prepared for the worst if the Ares I fails and prepared for the best if the Falcon 9 succeeds.
No, he's going beyond the purpose of what a graphics processing unit was originally for, and looking ahead to what General Purpose GPU computing is going to be for. There's nothing in the GPU that requires it to operate on polygons; the silicon is there to do parallel stream processing, and streams of geometry/texture/lighting/etc data are just one of the ways to use that.
The greatest thing that's wrong with politics right now is this team sport cheerleader mentality.
You're absolutely right!
Just ask Joel Liberman, who supports the Iraq war and some tax cuts and was attacked by his own party by them running and financing another Democrat to take his seat.
Wait, what?
Joe Lieberman's primary challenge was the opposite of the team cheerleader mentality. Instead of saying "He's a Democrat; we can't challenge his seat!" people were willing to look at the actual issues he supported and decide that they could put a better Democrat in office. In other words, they were able to look past the team colors he was wearing and judge him by how well he was playing. Just because you don't agree with those voters' definition of "well", don't dismiss what a valuable service they're performing by making Democratic politicians more aware that even the 50% of the population that mostly agrees with them aren't going to give them a free pass for having a "D" by their name.
Now all we need is for more Republican voters to do the same; if so many of them hadn't put that "team spirit" ahead of conservative values, the Bush administration and their cronies might have been replaced in time to save their party from imploding.
There are a couple changes that could make this easier. Get rid of plurality voting so that it becomes possible for moderate third party candidates to run without sabotaging their own voters. Get rid of the seniority system that punishes anyone who wants to replace their incumbent in Congress. But I suspect that if we could somehow get past the psychological problems of party politics, we'd find it easy to fix the technical deficiencies.
Another thing he failed to take into account is that people rationalise their "evil" choices to make it sound righteous. So people tell themselves and others its because of DRM or its because of the price or whatnot when in reality its just that they don't want to fork over money for it.
The first thing to ask someone like that is: "What [games/movies/music/etc] have you *not* pirated?" If they can name several titles, then you know there's at least some way for publishers to behave differently which could cause such a person to make another purchase instead of committing more copyright infringement. If they try to insist that every single creator in an entire medium can somehow be dismissed with one rationalization or another, then you can be pretty sure they're either lying to you or lying to themselves.
What, was there an earthquake?
an excessively extravagant security system preventing unauthorized pooping.
Preventing? A lockable toilet lid would only make unauthorized pooping much, much worse.
And who gave you the right to decide how each country and culture should think?
But you have not got the right to tell others that they are wrong simply because it is not in accord with your own personal view or it isn't the view adopted by your own country.
The United States and freedom of speech gives him the right to tell others that they are wrong for any reason at all (even when they're not!). I hope you're not trying to decide how my country and culture should think.
All I'm refuting is the idea that there was no common ancestor to all the life we know of today. It's entirely possible that there were multiple genesis events but that our ancestral cells wiped out all the competition.
I'd still bet against it, though. It seems like the "first mover" advantage would be too great; any potential competition would be eaten before it even got to the stage where genetic codes make sense.
Two independent life forms could make the same right vs. left handed sugar choice with 50% odds. I find 1 in 20^64 magnitude odds more convincing: specifically the genetic code.
All life just coincidentally decided that CAG was going to mean glutamine? And with the exception of a few codes in mitochondria and a few eukaryotes, the hypothetical multiple genesis also gave us random agreement on the meaning of 63 other codons? No. If every cell on Earth agrees on 55 out of 64 codes, and most agree on all 64, it's a very safe bet that their translation machinery was an inheritance from the same ancestor.
I called the idea of boiling water to produce energy on a spacecraft "stupid".
Oh, and in case you ever actually read this: go back and reread the "stupid" comment you replied to. It said nothing about boiling water.
If you don't know that VASIMR is an electro-thermal rocket, ie. one that uses an electric power source to excite the plasma, that's okay, but in that case you should probably think twice before insulting anyone (yes, "your idea is stupid" is an unnecessary insult) who tries to correct you. If you think that being corrected when you post something mistaken and insulting is "patronizing", imagine how it looks when you try to correct people who are trying to post something factual and polite.
If NASA had that attitude we'd probably have thousands of blown rocket husks laying about the island of Florida's thousand of craters.
Well, the government's first orbital rockets did tally up eight Vanguard husks from eleven launches. I'm very glad we did have Elon Musk's attitude back then, because "never say die" appears to be a big part of how we got to the Moon in the next decade from such inauspicious beginnings. I hope we still have the same attitude now, because it's going to be necessary if we're going to get through the redesign work necessary to make it affordable to get into space to stay.
The reliability problems will get better, if they can afford to make enough flights and gather enough data to work out the problems. One of the best current launch vehicles used by NASA evolved from ICBMs such as the ones that had given us four Atlas A husks out of eight (very suborbital) launches, through a series of successors with failure ratios like 3/10, 2/6, 32/135, 15/48... check out all the different versions for yourself, and get an idea of why aerospace engineering has entered the lexicon with "rocket science" as a synonym for "something really hard".
Have you ever heard of nuclear thermal rockets?
Whether he has or hasn't, he may have instead been talking about an electric rocket, such as the one described here and discussed here. I'd say that calling him "stupid" for that was rude, but mostly it was just perplexing.